Passenger(4)

I turn around and let my eyes scale to the top of the complex directly in front of me. It is a four-story row home, decoratively corniced, replete with barred, narrow windows and the protruding embankment of a stone parapet. The address on the building, imprinted on an embedded stone block beside the entranceway, matches the address on my hand.

You are here.

I do not know where here is.

I take the incline of steps to the entranceway and pause to examine the names and apartment numbers on the small panel just outside the door, a buzzer next to each name. None of the names are familiar. I locate the buzzer for apartment 3B—the apartment written on my hand—and discover it is the only buzzer without a corresponding name. Is this my home or someone else’s? The address on my hand could be anyone’s…

Cold, hungry, my head throbbing, I try the door. It opens. Relief washes through me. Suddenly, I want nothing more than to curl into a bed and close my tired eyes. Because this is a dream, a nightmare. Because morning will bring with it the spark of remembrance.

I hope this is my apartment.

The foyer is tight and low-ceilinged, with sickly yellow walls and a scuffed linoleum floor. The near-subliminal odor of old sweat and dust just barely register. Directly above my head, a dome light fizzes and crackles and hums. A row of locker-type mailboxes climbs up the wall to my left. Again, I do not recognize any of the names on the mailboxes. Again, there is no name on the box for apartment 3B.

There is a stairwell at the end of the foyer. My footfalls echoing on the linoleum tiles, I cross the foyer and proceed to mount the steps. Exhausted, I take them one by one. The ancient, wooden risers sigh beneath my weight. As I climb, I look up at the dizzying spiral of stairs, all the way to the ceiling four flights above. Another milky-looking dome light sits in the center of the ceiling, and it could be a million miles away: a sun in a distant galaxy.

I recognize none of this.

The apartment is 3B, but before I get to the third floor landing, I collapse on the stairs under the combined weight of my exhaustion, fear, and helplessness. Reflexively, I reach up to grip the head of the newel post for support. It is an ornamented, wood-carved pinecone that, to my shock, comes loose in my hand as I fold to the floor. I feel my body shudder, feel myself attempt to sob—but all that comes is a dry, heaving expulsion of air. My eyes are so dry they might crumble to dust and spill out of their sockets. I ease myself down on the stairs, my skin clammy but freezing. I let the wooden pinecone roll across the landing. Looking down at my shaking hands, I am seeing double, triple.

There is something inside me that refuses to move. There is an apartment somewhere above that may lend some insight into who I am and—hopefully—what has happened to me. What will I discover? What if I do not like what I discover?

Hugging myself, pushing myself up against the wall—

And then I remember a narrow stretch of roadway, with tall pines rising up on either side, with a sky of vivid blue, cloudless—

I am seeing this image projected on the undersides of my eyelids. It is instantly lucid and real…then quickly disperses in a scatter of light. Only then do I realize my eyes are pressed shut. So I open them and find myself huddled in the corner of the second floor landing, my knees pulled up to my chest, my hands gripping my shins. My vision is temporarily pixilated and, for a moment, I think I might pass out. And I welcome it, welcome the blackness. But the blackness does not come. And the vision of the roadway—the memory, if that is what it was—blinks out of my mind. Gone and disremembered.

“Don’t walk,” I tell myself, content to spend the rest of my days in a fetal position on the second floor landing. In my mind’s eye, I see nothing but a flashing orange hand.

But I do not listen to myself. I feel my body rise, straighten, and continue advancing up the stairs. My knees pop; my bones creak. The stairs, too, pop and creak. The balustrade feels loose under my hand; I can wiggle it like a tooth in diseased gums. The whole building is silent.

Then I am here: the third floor landing. I stand at the far end of the hall, taking in the doors on either side of the hallway and the single door at the opposite wall facing me. The oaken, musty smell of aged wood and grime infiltrate my senses—not just my sense of smell, but all my senses, to the point where I can acutely see the oldness of the hallway in detail, can hear the floating of the stagnant dust through the motionless air and feel the weight of the oldness, all of it, like a force against my skin, pushing down, pushing down. It is a wellspring of power, of overpower, the amplification tantamount to overdriven stereo speakers. It is my imbecilic, useless mind desperate to grasp at all my surroundings in an attempt to fill the void where my memory was once stored. An empty, voiceless void; a rip in space and time. Because if you can’t fill it with memory, you fill it with senses.

My memory…

How does someone forget who they are? How does someone wake up on a city bus as if fresh from the womb?

This waltz therapeutic—

Cut it out, I think. End the dance.

The door to apartment 3B faces me. There is a pitted brass number and letter above a peephole. Maybe it isn’t my apartment after all. The address on my palm could be anyone’s.

I walk toward the door and the hallway appears to expand with each step. I will never reach it. And—deeply, firmly—I almost hope this is true.

I reach out and touch the doorknob. Jiggle it.

Locked.

I have no keys. I have nothing but a canvas coat and an address scribbled on my left palm. But—